 This video was sponsored by Skillshare. The first 500 people to go to skl.sh slash polyphonic18 will get two months of Skillshare for free. Back in 2007, vinyl was nearly a dead medium. It was consigned to the most indie corners of the world, aficionados and collectors thumbing through dusty old crates. One such collector was a man named John Murphy. One day Murphy was shopping for vinyl in a store in Edmonton when he found an album that caught his eye. The artwork was simple, a dreamy man on a white background. The album was called LaMour and performed by a man known only as Lewis. Murphy bought the album for a dollar and in doing so kicked off one of the strangest mysteries in modern music. Let's take a closer look. The Lewis LP offered little information about its creator, but it did place the album temporally. LaMour was released in 1983. In some ways this comes together all too clearly in the music. The whole album is laying atop a soft bed of synthesizers, but the sound of these synthesizers isn't what you tend to think of when you place yourself in the mid-80s. Instead of flashy and over the top, Lewis's synthesizers are nuanced, more ambient than anything else in most places. You can hear this on even Rainbow's Turn Blue where they provide light atmosphere behind a twangy guitar, another of the album's signatures. On Things Just Happen That Way, the synths seem nearly entirely disconnected from Lewis's odd piano musings. The album credits a man named Philip Lee's with creating the signature synth sound that is omnipresent on LaMour. One of the draws of the album is the way that atmosphere sits over almost all of the music. It's calm, strange, and fragmented. Lewis finds a mood at the beginning of I Thought the World of You and stews in it until the end of Romance for Two. It's a mood that seems to be looking back to the despairing folk of Nick Drake with more than a touch of Brian Ferry and Roxy Music, but more captivating is the way it looks forward. It seems like it would fit next to the ambient melancholy of contemporary bands like The Antlers. This detached other worldliness begs a thousand questions, questions that aren't answered much by the lyrics. Lewis's singing is slurred and incoherent yet beautiful. When you do pick up words or phrases they seem to paint pictures of small intimate moments of romance or the forlorn feeling of those moments lost. In keeping with the title nearly every song on the album seems to be about love in its own broken way. It seems utterly unbelievable that something like this came out of the drug-fueled scenes of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The disjointed nature of the songs, the mumbled, inaudible lyrics, and the haunting beauty of it all was enough to set Murphy and his friend Aaron Levin on a journey to find out just who Lewis was. The album's package gave a few clues, namely that the copyright holder was a man named Randall Wolfe. Another detail was the photographer who took the album's cover photo, Ed Culver. Lewis is a strange footnote in the career of Culver who got a claim for documenting the west coast punk scene of the 80s. Some of Culver's photos even became the cover of a few punk albums including Black Flag's Damage and Bad Religion's How Could Hell Be Any Worse among others. But Culver remembered his shoot with Randall Wolfe, the man known as Lewis. Wolfe showed up to the shoot driving a white Mercedes convertible with a beautiful woman in his arms. He paid Culver with a $250 check but when the photographer went to cash it, the check bounced. The story of who Wolfe was seems incongruent with the vulnerable, misty beauty of Lewis's music. But it does go in line with another one of the album's many eccentricities. The track Romance for Two was dedicated to the famous sports illustrated model, Christine Brinkley. All of these details create a fuzzy picture of who Lewis might be but so much remains a mystery. When Levin uploaded some of Lewis' songs onto the blog Weird Canada in 2012, the internet began to speculate as to who exactly this man could be. Some thought perhaps he was an extraterrestrial visitor, come down for a brief moment to gaze at us with piercing eyes and share his ethereal musings. For others, he's a jet-setting playboy, bouncing around the world, stopping briefly to record a beautiful album. Others yet have him as a criminal and a con man, an elusive musical DB Cooper of sorts. And through these theories, more details about Lewis have come out. Murphy and Levin got in touch with Randall Wolfe's nephew, who said that he had been a stockbroker and recorded more music in Europe. Legend had it that Wolfe lived in an apartment full of all-white furniture. It even came out that he might have recorded some unreleased religious music in Vancouver later in his career. As collectors were searching for their own copies of Lamour, a few stumbled upon the jackpot, a second Lewis album. This time his name is scrawled in the cover as Louis Ballew and he poses next to a private jet and the white convertible Mercedes described by Culver. The second album is called Romantic Times and it opens on a crooning love tune that seems to quote strangers in the night. As a whole, Romantic Times is less ethereal. It's got a bigger, more developed sound in Lamour with saxophones and electric drums. Romantic Times has become an even rarer collector's item with only a handful of original copies ever found. It's so rare in fact that a copy sold on eBay for $1800 in 2014. All this brought new attention to Lewis and with it a reissue of his records by the label Light and the Attic and even though he's been brought into the spotlight we still know painfully little about the man named Lewis. Apparently most of his family has settled in British Columbia but he remains estranged from them. Light and the Attic has said they're holding the royalties for Lewis but so far he has yet to come forth and claim them. And maybe it's better that way. Maybe Lewis works better as a specter, as a mystery, as someone that we will never truly know all about. And Lewis' story is more than just a great mystery. It's a reminder of the countless unheard pieces of greatness out there today. It's a reminder that somewhere in the back corner of a record store sitting in a dusty milk crate is the next unknown masterpiece. Just waiting for you to find it. 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